Intermittent Fasting (IF)
With kinobody promoting it, intermittent fasting has a second lease on life so lets talk about it. People use intermittent fasting for fat loss or for muscle gain and its important to differentiate the two separate uses because its OK for one and not the greatest for the other.
Intermittent Fasting For Fat Loss
Lets start with using intermittent fasting for fat loss. Successful fat loss requires what I like to call hunger management. You need to find a method that prevents hunger while eating at a caloric deficit. Anything that lets you have a consistent caloric deficit for week after week, month after month will let you lose fat. The reason that avoiding hunger is imperative is that if you are hungry, your fat loss WILL fail, I guarantee it. You will end up binging or taking so many cheat days that you find it impossible to lose fat. There are a lot of methods of hunger management. Keto and low carb are two very popular methods of hunger management that work well for a lot of people. A lot of people like myself like the eat lots of non-starchy vegetables approach. intermittent fasting is another hunger management tool that works for some but its not magic. In fact, using intermittent fasting for fat loss has some serious disadvantages. Eating disorders are at an all time high and telling someone that they cannot eat is a great way to trigger an eating disorder. If you have any food issues at all or are prone to binging, using intermittent fasting is just asking for trouble so I suggest you try one of the other approaches.
Intermittent Fasting For Muscle Gains
So 8 years ago, Martin Berkhan popularized intermittent fasting with his “Leangains Intermittent Fasting” website. It was a money making machine with lots of smoke and mirrors with cherry picked research “proving” its effectiveness. Let me summarize for you:
Stupid Nutrition + Newbie = GAINZ
Stupid Nutrition + Steroids = GAINZ
There is a reason that his website has plummeted in popularity from one of the most visited website to a dusty footnote – people finally figured out that it didn’t work. Think about this for a moment. To build muscles requires protein. Explain to me ANY possible reason that it might be superior to go without protein for 16-20 hours a day?? It makes no sense! As in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale – “The emperor has no clothes!”.
All the intermittent fasting “success stories” prove is that the body is an amazing thing and can adapt to adverse conditions. People just starting lifting can make significant gains even if their nutrition sucks. Nothing new here, we have all known people who eat garbage and yet still gain lots of muscle. If a newbie takes a year and loses 20 pounds of fat dropping their bodyfat to 8% and gains 10 pounds of muscle they will have a jaw dropping transformation BUT had they used good nutrition they probably would have gained 15 pounds of muscle instead of 10.
Kinobody and Intermittent Fasting
Just when I thought this stupid intermittent fasting thing had died along comes Kinobody to breathe new life into this money making machine. Here is the BS he touts as benefits of intermittent fasting:
- reduces acne
- reduces shortness of breath
- increases mental clarity
- prevents colds
- increases sex drive
- makes you crave healthier foods
- allows binging on huge meals
- get lean despite binging
- increases muscle growth
Huh? People still believe this guy? This reads exactly like what it is, snake oil sales. I think we have the new Mike Chang minus the “Chinese Scientists”. My guess is that its just a short time before his website gets shut down for making the unsupported and ridiculous medical claims circled below:
